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No competition

While UC Berkeley’s football team might not rival that of Stanford, its newspaper vastly outshines the miserable broadsheet our friends to the south unjustly call a news source.

In a stunning feat of cooperation, The Daily Californian and The Stanford Daily produced a single special issue for Saturday’s Big Game. Each organization submitted eight pages, as the format essentially presented two discrete newspapers in a single edition. On the day of publication, a few of the Daily Cal’s copy staff edited Stanford’s pages for spelling and grammar. Here’s the result:

And that’s just the front page. A few highlights:

Managing Editor of News Marwa Farag predicts that the final score will be 10-1 in favor of Stanford. How a team scores one point in a game of American football will remain a mystery.

On page two, an info box misspells the name of Stanford defensive star Terrence Brown. Similarly, the name of Gary Tyrrell, a Stanford alumnus famous for being trampled by Cal defensive back Kevin Moen in the immediate aftermath of 1982’s “The Play,” is misspelled on page six.

Readers of the Daily are apparently so dense that the sports staff feels it is necessary to identify players by their jersey numbers in captions even when only a single athlete appears in a photo. Such is the case with the issue’s most prominent image, which dominates the front page.

The Daily also appears to lack an understanding of comma use and even, as suggested by myriad inconsistencies, its own style. Indeed, one must wonder whether the publication employs copy editors at all.

Clearly, despite Stanford’s rather decisive victory over Cal on the football field, on the newsstand, there is no competition.

About this blog

Strikeout seeks to clarify, critique and extrapolate on language and grammar present all around us. Here, The Daily Californian’s staff gets the chance to share grammatical expertise and muse about the impacts and influences of the wordy world around us.